Lone worker alarms for housing maintenance team

Maintenance workers at Circle Housing are being protected with the use of MySOS mandown personal safety alarms

In order to alleviate the risk to its lone working maintenance team, Circle Housing Property Services has introduced ‘MySOS Mandown’ personal safety devices, developed exclusively by Skyguard.

Circle Housing Property Services (CHPS) are an in-house property maintenance team providing services to Circle Housing’s regional providers. Employing around 115 lone working tradesmen across a large geographical area presented a high risk of workplace injury or assault. Not only are the tradesman often working from heights but regularly carry out tasks alone.

To mitigate the risk to its lone workers, CHPS chose to adopt Skyguard’s MySOS Mandown devices - a small, discreet and easy to use personal safety alarm, featuring GPS, GPRS and Mandown technologies. Certified to the highest industry standards (BS 8484, Secured by Design), the MySOS Mandown is the smallest and lightest device available in Europe, enabling the team to conveniently carry the alarm on their person. With two-way audio, it provides lone workers with a simple yet effective way to call for help in any emergency situation.

When the user raises the alarm, an alert is instantly sent to Skyguard’s dedicated Incident Management Centre (IMC), along with the GPS location of the device. A professionally trained Controller at the IMC will first listen in and assess the situation, before talking to the user and taking the appropriate action. Favoured largely by CHPS was the devices’ Mandown function, automatically raising an alarm in the event of a fall or sudden impact.

Mark Perkins, CHPS Health and Safety Manager explains: “The tradesmen now have confidence that they have support available to them at all times, even during out of hours call-outs”.

The system previously adopted by CHPS had proved unreliable, Mark went on to say: “We used to have a phone-in system for lone worker protection but this was complicated and cumbersome, and because of those factors it was not always used correctly.” Having adopted Skyguard’s MySOS Mandown devices, workers can operate on site with the assurance that emergency assistance is just one button away, “The direct access to the emergency services control rooms was a very important factor when deciding to purchase the Skyguard service.”

Having met with Skyguard for a demonstration of the MySOS personal alarms, CHPS were utterly impressed, proceeding to roll out 120 devices. Speaking on his initial experience with Skyguard, Mark commented: “The training and support that we received during the roll-out process was very professional, and any questions we had were answered promptly by the support team.”

When asked how they were finding the devices since implementation, Mark continued to say: “The response received to activation calls and accidental man down alarms has been fast and accurate which gives confidence in the support offered should there be a genuine incident. The availability of voice recordings for evidential purposes and the flexibility offered by the online portal were influential in our decision process.”

Having received unrivalled support from the care and support teams at Skyguard, Mark concludes: “I would certainly recommend Skyguard to other organisations, the customer support we have received has been excellent and the product has performed exactly as described”.